He kneeled and secured a rope to a projection in the rock over the hole that seemed designed for the purpose.
‘This is good,’ he said. ‘They’ve helped us out here, boys.’ He grinned. ‘Last one down’s a pauper.’ Then he lowered himself into the blackness.
What was in that pit? Vali. No, not Vali. Something had Vali’s thoughts but they no longer defined its personality. They were loose and unconnected, shooting stars, here and then gone. His memories and experiences were pulp, running into each other, friendship and love no more important than the feel of the rock under his feet, the cold of the cave.
At first he had accepted being in the pit because of his love for Adisla. He knew how near he had been to killing her, and though the sound of the slab sealing him in had filled him with despair, he had also welcomed it. While he was trapped he could cause no more harm. When he’d seen the stricken Noaidi, his animal self had taken over and he had accepted his fate for quite different reasons. He had food, the pit was sheltered - why would he not want to be there? Then the food had run out and he had beaten the walls with rage, leaped at the rock sealing him in, tried to dig his way out and eventually, as any beast would, accepted his fate and sat down.
By then he could hardly remember who he was. His humanity seemed like a shoal of silver fish, turning and moving in the water, suddenly possessing shape and form and then scattered to chaos by massive jaws.
Veles was not far behind Bodvar Bjarki. He cut his hands coming down the rope and cursed as he hit the rubble of the floor.
Someone threw down a burning torch. Veles picked it up and peered around. He touched the wall - something sticky was on his fingers. He licked at them and then wiped his tongue with his sleeve. It was blood.
In front of him Bjarki was edging forward, sword drawn.
‘There are emeralds here,’ whispered the berserk. ‘Look. They’re huge.’
‘Very likely cheap agate,’ said Veles, ‘I will need to value them properly.’
But they weren’t emeralds or agate. They were eyes.
52 King and Queen
The darkness was not the same as the last time, thought Authun. On the way into the caves from the back of the mountain the woman had taken flint, steel and tinder and a big bundle of candle stubs from a hole under a rock. She lit the candles, one off another, as they descended. But when one blew out the darkness did not seem to cling too close or to seethe with animosity and harm.
The woman had prepared him before they went down - in her way. She had taken the wolf’s head pebble that hung by a thong at her neck and tied it around his neck.
‘For luck?’ he said.
‘Death,’ she said.
He let her tie it. He felt no different, and as far as he could see it was only a piece of stone.
The king found it hard to credit that this entrance to the witches’ caves was so easy to find. It was virtually signposted - a narrow crawl running into the side of the mountain, identified by sacrifices left at its mouth. The tunnel had the shape of a long-handled spoon, spreading into a tall chamber at its end. Access to the actual caves was through the roof of the tunnel, reached by stacking a pile of flat rocks and hooking down a rope with a stick. Anyone could have got in. The split in the cave roof was far from obvious but Authun wouldn’t have trusted the entrance to stay hidden if the caves had been his refuge. It would only take a hunch from a curious warrior and the enemy would be in. Why had he gone up the Troll Wall when this was available just on the other side?
Authun wondered if he was heading into a trap. He reminded himself that no one coming to those caves would see anything the witches didn’t want him to see. So, were they allowing him in? He had looked at the uncollected sacrifices at the entrance - bottles and pots, anything that couldn’t be taken by animals. Were the witches even there?
Still, he wasn’t scared. Certain of death and welcoming it, there was no room for terror in his life. So the bodies of the boys, the rat-eaten corpses of the girls, the puffy flesh of the drowned women in the ponds and the rotting, blackened faces of those who hung by ropes from spars of rock only caused him the discomfort of remembering how many people he had sent to similar fates.
The constriction of the tunnels, however, was another matter. Authun was not afraid of death but he had no desire to suffocate, his own arms sealing his mouth and nose in a tight gullet of rock. Some of the passages were scarcely wider than his head and he had to squirm and wriggle his way through. He began to see why this entrance was not so well guarded as the others on the Troll Wall side of the caves. An enemy coming in this way would be hugely vulnerable. A warrior can’t fight with his arms pinned above his head. So the route was easy in some ways but at the same time very tricky, even without the witches sending their nightmares stalking through the passageways.
As he descended he became more and more sure the witches were dead. How could he have held on to his sanity so long in those tunnels if they hadn’t been? What had killed them? They rested by the light of a candle by an underground pool. The pool caught the reflection of the ceiling in the candlelight, turning it into a shimmering golden disc. He looked at Saitada. Had this woman become a witch? Was she now their servant and was he there to kill whatever had caused so many deaths in the tunnels? He put the thoughts aside. They were no good to him. He would just concentrate on what he would do. Act, as always, do and kill until he himself was killed. He wanted no more murders, but when the fight presented itself he would not shirk from it. He knew no other way.
After what he thought must have been a day in the caves he became aware of a soft glow answering the light of their candle from down the tunnel. He looked at the woman and put his hand to his sword. She shook her head, which he took for an assurance of safety.
Drawing quietly closer he realised that the light was a reflection of their own candle from a mass of gold. Weapons, armour, rings and jewels were piled to the ceiling like a miser’s dream. It was said the witches had collected tribute and plunder for a thousand years. It seemed too short a time to collect such a hoard.
‘How many have died to reach here?’ he said, as much to himself as to the woman, and then almost laughed. For most of his life he would have rejoiced in this, taken all he could and returned in glory. Not now. He hardly understood the purpose of riches any more. Jewels were called the tears of Freya, after the goddess who was said to weep them. He had thought it just a story for winter. But now he saw that tears and precious things have their fates tightly bound.
He touched a byrnie and a shield. Both were dull with age but very finely made and in good repair. The woman shook her head. She meant, he thought, that he would not need them for the battle he was to face. Something though - intuition or just the desire to die as he had lived, in war gear - came over him. In all his lonely meditations and nightmares of regret, some simple warrior’s habits had proved unshakeable. In an uncertain situation he would take whatever advantage he could. He put on the byrnie, found a gilded iron helmet to fit him and took up a splendid shield that bore the sign not of the wolf but of the raven. Odin’s sign.
Saitada set her candle on the floor, sat on the most comfortable stone she could find and watched him dress. She said that word again under her breath: ‘Death.’
There was movement in the mouth of a tunnel. Authun’s sword was out, liquid in the candlelight. There was another movement in a tunnel to his left. Then she was in front of him, not three paces away. It was a girl, a wasted and haggard child, dressed in a long and bloody white shift. In her hand was a broken spear shaft, the end burned in a fire until it was a wicked tapering shard, a blackened needle.
Authun had only ever seen her face twice before and then only in glimpses. But he recognised her - she was thinner and madder and starved and white but he recognised her. The necklace at her throat burned with all the colours of war. She was the witch queen.
‘Lady?’ said Authun.
‘Death,’ said Saitada, pointing to the child.
The candle went out. There was a noise from somewhere deep in the caves. It spoke to Authun’s body rather than his mind, pulling the skin into bumps on his arms and neck, drying his mouth and making his heart pump. It was fear given sound - the howl of a wolf.
The witch spoke. Her voice was hardly audible, cracked and weak. ‘Odin?’
Saitada struck a flint, and Authun saw in the flash that the queen was gone. Saitada struck again but could not make the tinder catch.
‘Odin?’
Saitada struck a third time and the witch was on him, driving the spear towards his head, but Authun caught it in one hand. The witch had no strength in her child’s arms. Authun reversed the thrust and smashed the butt of the spear into her eye. She shrieked and it was dark again.
Authun couldn’t understand why she had thought to attack him this way. She could boil a sleeping man’s brains five days’ travel away, why fight him like this? Then he thought of the amulet at his neck. Protection against magic was, after all, what they were for.
‘Get me light, girl! Strike that flint!’
Then something hit him like an avalanche.
53 The Battle in the Hoard Cave
Feileg had cursed himself for his inability to dive into the tunnel. It wasn’t a matter of bravery; he simply couldn’t do it, like he couldn’t fly. His limbs wouldn’t obey his commands: his attempts to push himself down into the pool only met with choking frustration.
Adisla had gone and his mind was in a terrible confusion. All he wanted had been his in the fleeting moment of her kiss. He wished that she could have just walked with him off that mountain and gone to his home in the hills instead of plunging into the pool. She had gone to meet the witches, to rescue the prince. He had no other course of action. He loved her, so he had to help her.
He waited for her to come back. It got dark. When it became light, he tried again. Useless. His body would not do as he told it.
He searched the mountain for an entrance in increasing desperation. In a bowl of rock above a dizzying drop there was a cave that looked promising - long and narrow with sacrifices at the mouth - but when he went inside there was the smell of humans but no sign of an entrance. Besides, the ceiling looked dangerously split. He thought it might fall at any instant, so he went back outside. He ran all over the mountain, looking for anything that resembled a way in. There was no alternative, he decided, he would have to try the Wall. He knew the entrances there were easier to spot but also that they were almost impossible to get to.
He climbed to the top of the great cliff, up to a knife-edge ridge on which strange tall outcrops of rocks like the fingers of a monstrous hand stretching for the sky loomed above him. These were the trolls that gave the Wall its name - rumoured to have been turned to stone looking at the beauty of the sunrise. He looked out over the land. He was so high up that it would take him, he thought, twenty heartbeats to hit the ground if he fell. Clouds drifted by beneath him. The route he had followed to reach this point was threatening enough; the overhang below him was almost unimaginable. But he had to try. He lowered himself, kicking his legs into the vast space below him, his feet feeling for a shelf, a hold. But, as in the pool, his body took over and he pulled himself up. He sat in the freezing wind on the edge of the Wall, hating himself for his cowardice. Then he saw something down on the plain.
There were two travellers far below. He would have ignored them, but then he heard something he had never heard before. It was a howl of pain, a thin blade of sound that seemed to quiver, not in the air but in his head. He knew who it was - Adisla, calling to him to help her. He saw a vision of that jagged rune on the sorcerer’s stone and felt a pull like a rip tide impelling him on. Feileg, to whom the language of the wolves was as plain as speaking, knew what the howl had said: ‘I am in agony.’
He had to get to her. Perhaps the travellers below would know an entrance to the caves. It was an idea born of desperation rather than good sense.
He watched them move around the Wall, and when he was sure of their route along a ravine he set off to meet them. Then doubts crept in. How long had he haunted these lands as a wolf, smashing and tearing and taking what he wanted? His experiences since the prince had captured him had made him forget who he was. These people would see him as a wild animal and very likely flee. He decided to follow them at a distance and watch for a time before approaching. Still, he would have to be quick. He descended the mountain in swift silent leaps.
He followed them from the top of the ravine around to the back of the mountain. At first he thought they were beggars. The woman was dressed in rags and the man no better. Only the curved sword that the man carried in his hands said that they were people of a different station altogether. Feileg, who had no real appreciation of gold or jewellery, was still dazzled by the magnificence of the scabbard, catching the winter sun in white flashes.
He decided to wait until night, take the man’s sword while he was sleeping, then he could bargain it back for information. But they did not stop to make camp, travelling on as the sun weakened to a smoky dusk. Eventually they came to the long cave that Feileg had already inspected. He followed them inside using all his hunter’s stealth and watched as the woman piled flat slabs one on top of another. Then she reached up with a stick and fished something from the crack in the cave’s ceiling. It was a knotted rope and she began to climb it.
Feileg felt like running forward, pulling her out of the way and climbing the rope into the dark, but had noticed the bearing of the white-haired man. He was old but he was strong. The wolfman was confident he could take him in a fight but saw no point. And the woman? Feileg knew the sisters never left the darkness so she wasn’t a witch. However, she seemed to know the caves and might lead him where he needed to go.
So he watched. The man held a candle while she climbed, then she lit another at the top and he went up. The rope was then pulled up and the light faded. Feileg gave it as little time as he dared, grabbed the stick and leaped up onto the pile of rocks. He poked around above him with the stick until he snagged the rope and tugged it free. Then he pulled himself up into the dark. Something else was under his hand. It was a pole and he guessed it would be used to knock over the pile of rocks and cover the tracks of anyone entering the cave. He left it where it was.
After a steep climb he came to where the rope was fastened. Here, the fissure sloped into a level tunnel. There was no light at first, but a wolf is a creature of smell, not sight. The human musk and the fish stink of the candle led him on until, faintly, he saw a glow.
He followed the trail down through the tunnels and the cracks, trusting to the scents when he couldn’t see a light. Feileg knew his chances of finding Adisla in that labyrinth were very small indeed but these two were his only hope. He didn’t know where they were going but they were going somewhere and they had light. That had to be better than crawling purposely through the dark.
As he descended, Feileg began to feel there was something else in the darkness, something that didn’t wish him well. He had no wolfstone to protect him, no gift from a god to keep him safe. The dark seemed like an animal itself, one that rubbed against him, licked his flesh, knew him even. Something, Feileg sensed, was crawling over his mind, sniffing at his thoughts, marking them with its own scent. The witch, he could tell, knew he was there.
On instinct, he tried to lose himself, to cut away that human part, to just be a wolf hunting in the dark, as Kveld Ulf had taught him to be. He felt the pressure in his head lift and move away. She had gone, but he knew that to get what Adisla wanted - to bring back the prince - he would have to confront the witch face to face. Even at a distance, her presence had seemed like a spider creeping over his brain.
Feileg was sweating now. The candlelight had stopped moving forwards. As he drew nearer it became stronger, its glow more golden. He edged his way to a corner and looked round.
The old man with the sword was standing in front of what seemed to be a hill of gold. The treasure was piled from
the floor to the ceiling of the cavern, and the chamber was not low. The man had put on a byrnie and a helmet and was holding a shield that seemed more for show than war. Feileg looked at the way the man stood in his war gear, the confidence that seemed to shine from him. He knew this would be no easy opponent, no merchant’s bodyguard to be smashed and dashed.
In front of the old warrior was a child, a haggard girl in a dirty bloody shift, carrying a broken spear shaft.
Then the light had gone. In the flash of a flint being struck Feileg saw the man and his companion, but the girl had vanished. Another flash. And another, and the girl was there, stabbing at the warrior with her spear shaft. Feileg saw her fall and then it was dark again.
And Feileg knew. The ragged little girl was the witch and the only hope for the prince Adisla loved. If the warrior was attacking her, that made him his enemy. It was flat dark but Feileg could hear the man breathing, smell his sweat, hear the movement of the rings on the byrnie.